Today is 2026/07/05, and this day I played the aforementioned game. To be fair, this is actually my second run, the other was a couple of years ago and I don’t remember how far I came. I’ll tell what I did and what I think about it.
In the tutorial, of course, there was nothing special. Grab a thing, get told by Fenrig what to do, punch some cadaver, kill a bunch of evil guys. What is more important is that I was struggling to launch the game, kind of.
You see, I use Arch btw, and that means that normally I’d have to run
the game through Proton. Normally this isn’t a
problem, but here… The game wouldn’t work under Proton, at all. And
using my usual wrapper with bare Wine, it still would not
function normally. The solution was running the .exe
through Wine. Just like that.
wine mm.exeWhy do I have to do all that? Doesn’t Steam handle such things? You see, again, I’m also europoor. Like very eastern europoor. So I pirated the game. If I will really like the game, I even may buy it on the going Steam sale. But okay.
And even through it runs, it’s still kinda buggy and laggy: sometimes the frame rate drops on my respectable rig, sometimes the screen resolution gets cursed, I don’t really know how to describe this, but it acts as if the UI shifted but visually it’s where it should be - the my workaround is to change the resolution to any other and back. Also sidenote: the fonts are a bit rigged but still readable.
But enough with Linux complaints, there’s a much more important thing after the tutorial level: Fenrig tells us to bring the crystal we’ve stolen over to Menelag way in Stonehelm and gives us the waifu Xana (more on that later).
Sareth rides to the city while Xana in his head is talking to me. I wonder if Sareth talks to her verbally, as if she was somewhere around physically, or mentally, since she’s in his head. But whatever.
The people around seem nervous, and that’s right because the welcome party for Sareth starts early and the necromancers come pay a visit. We witness some civillian casualties and help bring the cyclops down. Read as a little extension to the tutorial.
Sareth meets Leanna, she shows the path to Menelag. He is happy to see us. Too bad he was mistaken about that.
Later the same night some mercenaries in dark armor attack this guy’s mansion and oh god they killed all the servants! I feel so bad for the maids… yeah, that’s puberty talking - more on that later.
This is a good time to write about the combat. Last time I felt it was too slow and sluggish, and I think I may have found the reason - Sareth simply walks back slowly. Like significantly. And also you’ve got to hit goons many-many times. With that realisation, the combat actually feels nicer. My favourite move is grabbing a chair or a box and throwing it into a goon. It never gets old!
I explored the mansion while I was lost and found a couple secrets, that’s nice.
Oh yeah the Menelag is dead btw, some SCP-096 ended him. Leanna is sad. I - don’t care and go after the 96th right away - it’s stolen my fancy crystal after all!
I am not really here to debrief the storyline, btw, so I’ll be short: Sareth keeps killing goons until he finds the crystal and steals it.
I tried playing stealthily, but at this point it’s not really
possible, not with my Thief habits, because Sareth is yet
to learn to blend in shadows perfectly (that means I have to
get that perk for whole 10 points). So for now I’ll be aggresively beat
everyone up with a long sword I’ve found on the ship. Oh yeah, about the
ship.
We repo the boat. That’s it.
When I was exploring the ship, I found some cages with goblins. I tried to find a way to open the cages, but couldn’t. No, not because I’m very kind and wished to set the greenskins free, no, I wanted to kill them. Because a good goblin is a dead goblin. Goblin Slayer has taught me well. Although Xana hinted that there may have been a way. But idk.
After I finished off all goons on the boat, Leanna made me defend her while she… allegedly was “preparing the crew”. But I didn’t see any prisoners on board and there was only one way on the ship which I was defending from goons, so I have every right to imagine that all that time she was taking up courage to ask Sareth out like some anime schoolgirl. She wouldn’t use the goblins as the crew, would she? Oh yeah, right, she asked Sareth out for a private talk.
I just wanted to thank you and tell that you’ve become very importnt to me…
And you haven’t lol
First in a month I’m turning 17 and yes Xana, I would love if you were something more for me.
Xana is hot, cynical, and her humor is dry. She is clearly supportive, I love her. She’s a demon? Even better!
Leanna is… Who is she, really? A shy uncle’s snoflake girl that instantly hates me if I kick a dork in my way lightly? No.
I hope I have elaborated enough on this topic.
The island with some spider god temple, a dragon, and lots of orcs.
In general I think I’m going for a father ending, because certainly I’m ending Leanna. I’m looking forward to paint the world red with Sareth’s father or without. Yeah, I’ve been spoiled the endings and the fact that Sareth is the local dark lord’s son.
Sidenote: I love the name “Sareth”, it sounds semitic.
And I actually finished it this time on 2026/07/06, and I have things to write down.
I switched to my lovely nostalgic Windows 7 installation for the game. At least now the resolution is stable, even though the game still misbehaves.
So, what happened since I finished my last entry? I’ll be brief (lie).
Sareth and Leanna sail to the scary ass spider god temple island, because we are looking for some sort of shadow skull. While doing so, I killed an ogre on top of a bunch of orcs and goblins and a whole dragon that got oneshot by a gate. Ggwp.
After the glorious showdown with the dragon our old buddy necromancer Arantir comes over and kidnaps Leanna. Not that I cared much but okay.
When Sareth actually gets his hands on the skull after wandering1 around some evil spider dungeon with evil spider statues, Arantir simply and shamelessly steals it. How rude!
This is the moment Sareth finally finds out that he’s the son of uhh local Mehrunes Dagon? That he’s the “Dark Messiah” the profecy has been about. And also after this point Sareth can transform into some demon to reap and tear, but I didn’t use it like at all.
Sareth escapes the evil ass spider island. Yeah, just like that. The only notable event during the escape is that I found a “Master Thief Clothes” (or idk I wasn’t playing in english) with mentioned a ‘G’ literal on it in the description. I get the reference and I love it, walked through the remaining game in that armor.
Sareth returns to the evil necromancer basement to teleport to the evil ass faraway necromancer fortress to find out what Arantir is up to. Turns out he’s gonna sacrifice Stonehelm to cut off hell from the world or something. And we are here to liberate the mightiest demon. Turns out the necromancers are the lesser bad guys, eh? Sidenote: for some reason necromancers use human slaves for cheap labor, despite literally being necromancers. Weird.
Also somewhere around that time I killed Leanna. Hooray!
When we return, the city is attacked and on fire. But all we care about is necropolis where Arantir is doing his Arantir things. On our way there Sareth kills another dragon and Leanna, again, but as a lich this time. She’s such a loser lmfao just freeze her and keep finishing off, it required like 3 fatalities for me.
When we enter the necropolis, it turns out we need to kill 4 king cucks or something, I can’t recall the wording already, the point is they turned out to be bitch ass liches and I killed one in the middle of the location without knowing it. Around by that time some bastard who called himself Istvan, Ishtvan, Esteban, idk, asked to drop his body and end his suffering and for that he would put a word in for us but idk, even though I tried for the sake of curiosity, the chains disconnected but he was still floating there, so I shrugged it off and kept going. Also he’s kind of a pedophile so idk let him hang out there.
We finally face off Arantir, the one who we have been supposed to fear… He summons a bone dragon three times while making unoiled door sounds and takes a bit of beating and then whe he admits the defeat he simply disintegrates. I call it anticlimactic.
Finally we take back the shadow skull and we can either keep it for ourselves or fulfil the dad’s will and liberate him. Doesn’t really matter, since the epilogue I witnessed is one (1) cutscene and a different stanza following the original prophecy. I prefer the ending without dad though, because what if Sareth manages to build a utopia? Like, since the shadow skull is so powerful, its owner practically becomes a god.
Hooray. Damn that’s a lot of filler text.
Let’s finally assess the gameplay.
Combat, combat, combat. I find it rather frustrating. Time to kill is large. I mean that it fits more a multiplayer game where you want to give the player a reaction window. In this game, a very generous window. You can deal with a goblin for like 35 seconds and for a good 1.5 minutes with an orc. Because of that the progression is almost invisible because it’s equally tedious to beat up a mercenary or a lich.
Also the finishing off mechanic is frustrating - when an enemy falls down, they don’t usually die, they are just knocked out and soon to get up. While they’re down, you’re supposed to end them with a heavy attack but man, in the fight I missed half the times.
There are many items in the game and an inventory to keep them in. I don’t get this part of the game, because there are lots of items, and most of them seem useless. Why do books and notes take up space like daggers? Why are there half a dozen different dagger variations? And why have so many items if you can’t sell them?
The movement is still clunky. Sareth has inertia, and climbing is very uncomfortable.
Also the version of the game I’ve got here is very buggy - goblins often stutter, sometimes Sareth is blinded just because, and I managed to clip through textures couple times. If I am able to accidentally clip OOB in your game, you did bad play-testing.
Overall, the game plays as alpha test of Dishonored, which it is essentially. Arkane did a much better job on that game and I am happy.
I can recommend << Dark Messiah of Might and Magic >> for familiarization purposes: if you’ve wondered how would Dishonored feel should it be made on Source rather than UE3, this is it. The campaign takes I’d say 14h and if you go through all of it, you’ll appreciate how polished and fluid Dishonored is.
I wish english language had such word as “шароёбиться” since this is what Sareth was doing - wandering without a clear aim for hours, and by Sareth I mean myself.↩︎